You need to hear this.

One in 61 emails is a phishing scam

I don’t know about you, but I get hundreds of emails every day. Among all of those emails, there are a lot of work-related items, promotional offers, notifications, and random people trying to sell me stuff. But did you know a new study found that one in 61 emails that gets through to your inbox is a phishing email?

According to ZDNet:

“Analysis by security provider Mimecast found that between August to November and December to February, the number of emails delivered despite featuring a malicious URL increased by 126 percent...In total, Mimecast analysed 28,407,664 emails delivered into corporate inboxes which were deemed ‘safe’ by security systems and found that 463,546 contained malicious URLs — the figure represents an average of one malicious email getting through for every 61 emails that arrive.”

I knew that phishing was a problem, but it feels more real when someone actually quantifies it. As always, remember to stay safe when you’re sifting through your email, and beware of anything that seems fishy (phishy?).

Hacked car alarm systems give hackers access to vehicles

Your car alarm is supposed to keep people from stealing your car, while other peoples' alarms were seemingly made to occasionally keep you from sleeping at night. For the security use case, ironically, car alarms from Pandora and Viper could potentially make it easier for hackers to break into your vehicle due to a recently discovered security vulnerability in the alarm systems.

According to TechCrunch:

“It’s because the vulnerable alarm systems could be tricked into resetting an account password because the API was failing to check if it was an authorized request, allowing the researchers to log in. Although the researchers bought alarms to test, they said ‘anyone’ could create a user account to access any genuine account or extract all the companies’ user data."

Overall, researchers say that roughly three million cars were vulnerable worldwide, but the issue has since been fixed. Now, hopefully alarms can go back to their usual roles of car protecting and sleep depriving as usual. And not a moment too soon. Researchers were able to remotely unlock doors and kill engines on hacked vehicles.

But there's more going on in the world than that.

SpaceX’s people-transporting Dragon capsule lands

What’s cooler than going to space? Going to space AND docking with the International Space Station. That’s exactly what SpaceX’s Dragon capsule, which was designed to carry human beings to space (eventually) just did. And now it has returned to Earth to share exactly what happened during its journey.

According to BBC:

"The test craft was part of SpaceX's efforts to prove the viability of using commercial craft to send American astronauts to the International Space Station (ISS). Engineers from SpaceX will now pore over the data collected by the craft's onboard dummy, named Ripley, with a flight using real astronauts planned for July.”

The capsule returned to Earth on Friday, touching down in the Atlantic Ocean at around 8AM, meaning it did something super cool before most of us got to work.

And you can't not know this.

Boring Company wants to build Las Vegas 'people mover'

Speaking of Elon Musk, his tunnel vision (pun intended) might become a reality in Las Vegas. His plan is to build a self-driving “people mover” that would quickly transport people underground, and the Las Vegas Convention Center seems to be on board with the idea.

According to TechCrunch:

"The initial design would focus on the Las Vegas Convention Center, which is currently in the midst of an expansion that is expected to be complete in time for CES 2021. The newly expanded Las Vegas Convention Center will span about 200 acres once completed. The LVCVA estimates that people walking the facility would travel two miles from one end to the other, a distance that prompted officials to find a transportation solution.”

If all goes well, autonomous vehicles would drive people rapidly through the tunnels within two years. Sounds like an ambitious plan, but it would be impressive if the (anything but) Boring Company could pull off this feat, on schedule.

46 Replies

So, we have SpaceX preparing to commercially deliver humans to the ISS. Autonamous vehicles ferrying passengers. Then we have stats on internet fishing where your best defense is 'dont click on that'. Still wondering why evolution wasted opposable thumbs on IT security engineers.

This person is a verified professional.

So, we have SpaceX preparing to commercially deliver humans to the ISS. Autonamous vehicles ferrying passengers. Then we have stats on internet fishing where your best defense is 'dont click on that'. Still wondering why evolution wasted opposable thumbs on IT security engineers.

This person is a verified professional.

So, we have SpaceX preparing to commercially deliver humans to the ISS. Autonamous vehicles ferrying passengers. Then we have stats on internet fishing where your best defense is 'dont click on that'. Still wondering why evolution wasted opposable thumbs on IT security engineers.

This reminded me of the old trope, "We can put a man on the moon, but we can't..." :)

Do I really want a program scanning my email and evaluating whether or not a URL is okay for me to see? Am I naive enough that I want to act on the premise that everything someone tells me is truth and every link is a planned and wanted link?

How much of these phishing emails are actually put out by the email scanning and AV companies to justify their existence and generate fodder for reports like this?

This person is a verified professional.

Wait. Who are these lazy people who aren't at work by 8 AM? The only downside to being an early bird is that my body is convinced it was woken up at 4:15 this morning thanks to that horrible idea called daylight savings.

This person is a verified professional.

Wait. Who are these lazy people who aren't at work by 8 AM? The only downside to being an early bird is that my body is convinced it was woken up at 4:15 this morning thanks to that horrible idea called daylight savings.